Another window, another world.

This is my father’s family, in a photograph taken near Jennings Creek in Boutetourt County, Virginia. Near as I can figure, it must have been taken around 1917. My father, the little boy right between the mother and father, was born in 1907, and I’m guessing he’s about 10 years old in this photograph. If that’s right, then my grandfather, born in 1867, would have been about 50. He doesn’t look that old, but sometimes those Scots will fool you.

My father was 50 when I was born. All my aunts and uncles on his side were older than he, some of them considerably older. (My aunt Bertha was already married or nearly so by the time of the picture: the tall gentleman in the left rear is her husband Roy Mays.) When I was growing up in the 60’s, all but one of them were already retired. Many of them had worked at the American Viscose plant in Roanoke before and during WWII, making rayon (“artificial silk”) and pretty good money, too, for a set of hardscrabble farmers.

In some ways, I grew up in the 1960’s and the 1930’s simultaneously. When our families gathered and folks started talking, most of the stories were several decades old. All the playfulness–and for Scots, they could be pretty playful at times–was from an era that had vanished from most social currency and was being erased from the very architecture as Roanoke continued its development. For my dad’s people, a childhood without electricity or running water came vividly and easily to mind, and was the source of much hilarity.

The adventurous ones in the family moved to Roanoke to find work in the big city. My father stayed on the farm to help his father and mother. He eventually came to Roanoke, too, in the early 1950’s, several years after his father died of a stroke, but he never really made his peace with the city. We took several trips to his old homeplace when I was a child. The house where he was born and raised was not much more than a shack, planted athwart a hill a few hundred feet from a riverbank. The house where his mother made her home after his father died was a real frame house, but it too was not much more than four rooms and a roof. Out back and up a gentle slope, however, was a spring, the first I ever drank from. The mountain water I drank from that hollowed-out gourd was the most delicious I have ever tasted.

Sunday winsomeness. Just got the scanner working again, and Alice handed me this window onto another world for a test scan.

This photograph from 1986 (as near as I can remember) offers ocular proof of my distant kinship with Bryan Alexander. (Who knew?) It also offers merriment, at least to me. 1986 was not an easy year; in fact, 1986-1989 was quite a bumpy ride. But when I see this photograph, and that brainy fox who for some reason thought it was worth hanging around me (and for some reason still does), I feel merry. I made it out of the trough. Plenty of troughs and mountains since then, of course, but also the knowledge that I made it out–and with that brainy fox still at my side.

Hello, brother from twenty years ago. Be merry! You’ll get your degree, you’ll get a job as a professor, you’ll find more interesting people to learn from than you ever would have imagined (and you could imagine meeting lots of them). Some of your close friends in 1986 are still there, still pushing you to be your best self. New friends, vital companions, keep coming. In three years you’ll be learning computer animation on an Amiga. In four years you’ll have your first email account, and meet the first friend you’ve discovered online (over a bulletin board called the Blue Ridge Express). Later that year, your son will be born. In six years you’ll get your degree and move to San Diego for two years to teach at the University of San Diego. In eight years you’ll move to Fredericksburg and begin your career at the University of Mary Washington (nee Mary Washington College). Two months after your arrival in Fredericksburg, your daughter will be born. Things get even wilder from there–and then wilder still.

Troughs ahead. Mountains ahead. Be merry!

Photograph by Michael Thomas

EDIT: The photographer contacted me with the following corrections:

The B&W photo you blogged was from the fall of 1987, from your and Alice’s first visit to meet Helen [Michael’s daughter]…. The same B&W sequence, of which I believe you have a full set of copies, includes one of you introducing Helen (in her swinging bassinet) to electric guitar.

Apparently even in the full throes of late grad school fugue I was doing something productive for the next generation, although history will record that Helen became a drummer, not a guitarist. I think the principle holds anyway.

And now my friend Michael has made a guest appearance on my blog.

The blogosphere keeps leading me to more wonderful things. Dorine Ruter (I’m sorry to omit the umlaut) linked to my post below. I saw the link as a trackback, and went to Dorine’s blog, where I read her fascinating account of experiments by Christine Brons in using video to facilitate analysis of teaching and learning. It will be no surprise to any parent, but still a wonder to all human beings, to read that the brain of a two year old is so complex that one must freeze the video frame every three seconds to take stock of the rich responsiveness of that toddler in a learning situation–even when the learning is indirect because the teacher interaction is happening with another child.

My own learning took several leaps forward by reading Dorine’s post. Her use of my own post in an even richer context helped me learn a great deal about my own experience and questions. Her meditation on those questions resonated very powerfully with my own mulling, but took it all forward another step, just as a rich conversation will do. She introduced me to Christine Bron’s work, which I will now investigate (though to date there is no English version available–time to learn Dutch). And by going to Dorine’s Bloglines blogroll, I found yet another blog that I have added to my own desultory reading list.

And of course Dorine lives in the Netherlands, and I have never met her, though on this day she was a true colleague and mentor. Astonishing.

In some respects, the indirect commentary, the distributed conversation, the citation paradigm of blogs that quote and link to other blogs and the trackbacks that make the citations immediately visible, all pry loose some things that might otherwise stay stuck. Or to put it another way, the distributed conversation is less about back-and-forth and more about building toward something we will all have created. In that way, it actually feels more permanent. To see some of my own ideas not just replied to, but actually used in another context, is a very powerful motivator and deeply satisfying. Scholars have always found these satisfactions, but they’ve never come so quickly–or with such creative energy a consistent part of the experience.

Sometimes it’s hard not to be awestruck by what blogs enable.

My friend and colleague Claudia Emerson received some thrilling news this afternoon: her third book, Late Wife, has been awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. The Pulitzer site doesn’t permit easy linking to specific pages, so here’s the Arts and Letters list as published this afternoon:

Letters, Music and Drama Awards

FICTION March by Geraldine Brooks (Viking)
DRAMA (No Award)
HISTORY Polio: An American Story by David M. Oshinsky (Oxford University Press)
BIOGRAPHY OR AUTOBIOGRAPHY American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin (Alfred A. Knopf)
POETRY Late Wife by Claudia Emerson (Louisiana State University Press)
GENERAL NON-FICTION Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya by Caroline Elkins (Henry Holt)
MUSIC Piano Concerto: ‘Chiavi in Mano’ by Yehudi Wyner (Associated Music Publishers, Inc.)
Premiered February 17, 2005 by the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

I’ll blog about this wonderful, happy event more fully later on. For now, let me simply say that it has been one of the great privileges of my life to have been in conversation for nearly a decade with this extraordinary artist. That this award means a greater public will share this pleasure makes me feel that there is, after all, some justice in this world.

I am also delighted to say that there is a podcast available on UMW’s Profcast site of Claudia reading from her new book. [EDIT: the Profcast site is no longer active. I have left the audio link, however, as there may be other sites that link to it.] So far as I know, it’s the only recording of her reading from Late Wife, though I know that will change very soon now. If you’d like to hear Claudia read before her home audience, though, here’s where you’ll find it. The link means the file will also podcast from this blog, which is just fine by me! I’m in a mood to shout it from the rooftops.

Bravo, Claudia!

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (26.0MB)

I figure anyone who reads my blog is probably already (I almost wrote “always already” but that’s just too arch, and too many modifiers) reading Bryan Alexander’s blog, but just in case: today Bryan blogs on Pulse, a Web 2.0 compliant networked book. I’ve only had time to skim over the site, but already I can tell I will have to spend some serious time there.

This project is very exciting.

So go read Bryan’s blog, and understand the significance of this project in a larger context. Then click on over to Pulse. If like me you want a rousing preface to give you a framework for the whole experience, be sure to start with the “Why is this Web 2.0 compliant?” page. It’s a short course in the Web 2.0 meme, all by itself.

Kudos also to the designers. I find Pulse enjoyable to read onscreen. I can’t say that about all my online reading.

Here’s a podcast of my presentation last Sunday at the “E-Learning Futures” pre-conference workshop for the 2006 University Continuing Education Association conference. The occasion represented a number of firsts for me. It was my first presentation for this organization. I hope it won’t be my last, as I found my colleages at the conference to be focused very intensely on what colleges and universities must do to address our mission of providing opportunities for life-long learning to our world. It was my first time presenting from a wiki. Thanks (as ever) to Brian and Bryan for inspiration and guidance in all things webby, and thanks to Alan for Levine’s Law: start with the demo. It was my first time learning of Berkleeshares (where have I been?), and of the many fascinating models of online education at the Berklee College of Music, where Debbie Cavalier is Dean of Continuing Education. Debbie organized the session I was part of, superbly. I look forward to what I will continue to learn from her. I was also very impressed by her presentation on “Collaborations,” in which she was joined by two other fine presenters, Barbara Macaulay of UMassOnline and Linda Behrens of UC-Davis Extension. And coming to us from Adobe Systems and the Learnativity Alliance, Ellen Wagner‘s lunch presentation on “Mobile Learning Comes of Age?” was a great capstone to the session: funny, informative, pointed, thoughtful.

One other first: I had never before asked attendees to take a survey before the presentation. Inspired by the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative, I decided to give it a try. I used phpSurveyor to whip up a fast thirteen-question survey. Along the way, it occurred to me that it would be interesting to survey my students before a course begins, for several reasons: it would communicate to them that I want to know them and want to help them know each other, it would give me useful information for my own planning, and (this was the stealth realization, the a-ha for me) it would allow me to plant seeds for our work together. For example, let’s say I ask them a question about their familiarity with this or that, and their answer is “no, don’t know that.” By even asking the question, I’ve planted a seed in their minds that may help them later when the topic comes up. Some little bit of scaffolding, a little bit of prep.

phpSurveyor is open source, and I run it on my Bluehost account, which also hosts my blog and podcasts (among many other things). There’s a lot of power here for very little money. Best of all, I learned something valuable. Special thanks to Jerry for the inspiration to try phpSurveyor.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (18.7MB)

IMG_1590

Originally uploaded by Gardo.

On my way out of the San Diego airport last week, I spotted this celebrity. So did many others in the airport. His art has meant a great deal to me over the years, and to see him in person was very moving. I almost went up and said “thanks,” but decided against it, a decision I’m regretting now.

Trying to evoke old 70’s TV shows is a full-time job. I’m sure that someone, somewhere is drawing a nice salary doing so. Me, I’m just trying to get the caffeine past the blood/brain barrier.

Which brings me to this interesting article from the Seattle Times, by way of the reliably interesting Podcasting News. Seems that lots of Seattle colleges and universities are finding podcasts very much to their liking. Some quick points from the article, with even quicker comments:

Three students discussed their online lives, both academic and social, at the conclusion of the 2006 Student Academy on Information Technologies at the University of Mary Washington. In the photo above, they are (l-r) Carmen Ruth, Whitney Roberts, and Bethany Phillips.

It was a fascinating discussion. The audio for some of the questions is marginal, as the questioners were very far off-mike, but the panelists’ remarks come through loud and clear. I won’t offer any commentary of my own; the discussion speaks for itself.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (30.6MB)

It occurs to me lately that I don’t blog very much about my own experience teaching specific classes. I’m not sure why. Part of it may be because teaching at its best is such a rush for me that I risk sounding even more trippy and wiggy than I already do. That wouldn’t bother me so much, but it might make it harder to connect with the story. 🙂 Or it may be because the stories feel so intimate to me. I don’t mean the routine stuff. The usual kerfuffles and complaints are tired and predictable–the papers to grade, the disengaged yawners and watch-checkers, and worst of all, the days when I feel empty and flat and uninspired, indeed a bear of very little brain and no fresh ideas to catalyze the students into following the traces of their own engagement. No, I mean those days when the magic happens. When the big bell rings and a sudden, wild surmise seizes half the class, and me, with an idea or insight or epiphany that leaves us breathless. I assure you I do not exaggerate. Nor do I boast: I have some part to play in all this, but my experience is that great classes achieve greatness because of the students. When they come off the blocks from the first challenging or puzzling thing I say, when they fill the discussion forums with a burning intensity, passionate curiosity, and even a committed playfulness (Lewis’s phrase “solemn romp” comes to mind), when they work and work and work at an idea until they have not only understood it but extended it and taught me things I never suspected, then that’s a great class. To that festival of making I bring expertise, commitment to the conversation, strategies to keep the conversation going and the answers complex, and most of all, a desire to keep us all ready for the magic. That’s certainly not nothing. That’s necessary–but not sufficient.

There was some magic yesterday, and while I don’t like to single out one bit and privilege it over another (I also have a commitment to welcoming magic in disguise, and to avoid making up my mind too early about it), I feel compelled to record two instances. One moved me deeply. One intrigued me mightily. I can’t capture either for you–in the first instance, you really did have to be there–but I feel I should set them down, if only as a reminder for me.

In my Sixteenth-Century British Literature class, truly one of the most invigorating classes I’ve ever been part of (read: almost every day I am Just Blown Away), we’re working our way through Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, Book I. This is an almost unbearably complicated work, but it’s also almost unbearably compelling, for the richness of its imaginary landscape, the beauty and care of its poetic craft, and the intensity of its observations regarding the tangle of human experience at every level. Yesterday we lighted on the topic of despair, one of Spenser’s great concerns. There in the middle of talking about Una’s despair over the Red Cross Knight’s abandonment of her, I was trying hard to push at the largest sphere of human concern in the context of Spenser’s allegory, namely, the utter certainty that, to quote C. S. Lewis once more, if you “give your heart to anything it will most certainly be wrung and quite possibly be broken.” Leaving aside the question of betrayal and misunderstanding, we must finally confront the Great Betrayer, death itself. Unless we are Baucis and Philemon and blessed by the gods with simultaneous deaths, we will always be either abandoned or abandoning. At that point, one very serious student who sits near the front raised her hand and told the story of having to put to sleep their family’s beloved dog of fourteen years. As she told the story, she got to the point of telling us about the anguish her child in particular felt over the dog’s death. And then she took it a step farther, weeping as she did, and at the same time doing beautiful justice to the depth of Spenser’s great poem. She told us that she knew her child would eventually want another dog, and that she would indeed get her another dog, knowing as she did so that she was getting another inevitable death to wring their hearts.

That may sound as if a maudlin, personal, pass-the-orange-and-discuss-your-feelings moment interrupted the scholarly flow in that class. It may sound as if an “I can relate to that” took over the work of analysis. That’s exactly my point; that’s exactly what didn’t happen. What did happen was a breathtaking, absolute commitment to sounding the depths of Spenser’s work, a moment that took us right back to the work itself with utmost answerability. The class, in short, had decided long ago–how, I do not know, but I wish I could bottle it and carry it around with me always–that it was ready. Ready for what? It’s in the nature of things in education that the “what” reveals itself only after the readiness is demonstrated. “Readiness is all.”

The second thing I need to record is a moment growing out of an afternoon class that is never quite so intense as the morning class, though it has its own sneaky rewards. Yesterday we were to discuss Pope’s “Essay on Criticism,” part 1. When I got to class, I sensed that some folks probably hadn’t done the reading, and that that might be partially my own fault given that I had had to cancel class on Thursday but didn’t send a message out to say “we’re still on track on the syllabus.” So that was the wobbliness at the outset. My strategy, given the wobbliness I at least was feeling, was to get at the big questions Pope is asking about critical judgment. Are there standards? Does it all come down to personal taste, and if so, what justification does any professor have for the selections on her or his syllabus? If it’s all taste, why should we learn about that? If it’s not all taste, how can we know what is and what isn’t? The discussion soon got into the wonders of canonicity, grading papers, improving as a writer (if it’s all taste, what does it mean to “improve as a writer”? is it all a popularity contest? etc.), and a host of other considerations. I won’t say the class was on the edge of their seats–I would be lying if I did–but several students were engaged to the point of speaking out quite a bit, including at least one who rarely speaks but, as it turns out, writes her own poetry and would like it to be good, not just popular, so that it might live on after her.

Here’s the hook, though, for me anyway: after I got back to my office and started my round of afternoon attempted catch-up (I didn’t make it, again), one student came by to continue the conversation. It got interrupted, of course, and alas. I feared that the readiness I seek would evaporate as the student found the prof too busy to keep getting after these vexing questions now that class was over. (I hate thinking that anyone would ever think I would every be too busy to keep getting after these vexing questions, but the truth of course is that the work piles up and as a half-time admin I am committed to those responsibilities, and by choice.)

I shouldn’t have worried. Readiness is all. And this student was ready. I know this because she later sent me an email inviting me to look at her continued efforts to think through the questions. Those efforts were on her blog, in LiveJournal, and they amounted to a dogged, insightful, and inspiring 1000+ word essay that simply poured out of her four hours after class was over.

I was honored by the invitation to look at these musings, and struck once again by how valuable (and rare) it is to have such a view of the learner’s mind. If I can see the cognition happening, I can have a much more powerful and sophisticated understanding of what I can contribute as an advanced learner (i.e., as a teacher). If I were a music teacher, or a golf pro, I could watch the fingering, or the swing, and say “ah, I see that you’re doing this, or that, or forgetting this, or that.” But as a professor, I have a hard time seeing the fingering or the swing. Instead, I see bits of cognition happening in class, and some more-or-less ossified traces of cognition in papers. Often, I see the cognition happening in discussion forums, and those moments are crucial to me. But to see an essay–for that’s what it was–that really was an essay–an attempt–was particularly valuable to me as I consider the shape and needs of this learner’s quest. And the serendipity of it all made it feel more authentic, more like what happens when the mind begins to understand the scope of the question, the contours of the problem space. Those beginnings are rarely the result of connecting dots. They’re more in the way of a wild surmise.

Can these moments be scaled? Can they be assessed? I am haunted by these questions. All I know is that both these moments, and the others like them that make teaching such an addictive profession, are at the heart of what I call education. Real school. Any answers or theories of education that don’t at some level speak to this heart will not satisfy me.

Readiness is all.